The paradox of a contemporary museum becomes most overt when an institution that deals in established status enters a realm where doubt is both inevitable and essential. It isn’t clear that the museum is the best place for new objects to be tested. With so much invested-financially, culturally, and even politically-in these institutions, their tendency is to cover up the vital uncertainty of the moment (everything from the quality of the work to its meaning and eventual role in history) with a wealth of supporting material.
At the Dana Schutz exhibit at the Rose in Waltham, a wall paragraph informed visitors that her ouvre tells “the story of the history of painting in the twentieth century (German Expressionism, Matisse and the Fauves, Gauguin and the Symbolists, and Philip Guston, among others)…[in] a unique pictorial language that, just like her own narratives, has no beginning or end.”
The oblique grandeur of this claim-typical of curatorial attempts to prematurely canonize artists-inspires nothing so much as a nostalgia for commercial galleries, where at least they are only trying to sell you the thing.
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